I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
IRVIN D. YALOMI thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
IRVIN D. YALOMIn a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOMLife is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMYou will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
IRVIN D. YALOMDoes a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
IRVIN D. YALOMOnly free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
IRVIN D. YALOMJust as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
IRVIN D. YALOMRather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
IRVIN D. YALOMI must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
IRVIN D. YALOMThere are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOMNot to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOMThere is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM